Web Scraping in Plain English
Web scraping turns web pages into structured data. Start with the fundamentals, pick the right stack for static vs JavaScript-heavy sites, then scale responsibly with rate limits, robots.txt, and a clear legal line between public data and authenticated access.
114 articles · Updated August 17, 2026
Prefer official APIs when they exist. Scrape public pages politely — respect robots.txt, throttle requests, and never treat login-walled data the same as the open web.
Related topics
Featured articles
Hand-picked and latest articles from this topic.
Getting started
Beginner-friendly guides to help you learn the fundamentals.
From Explain
Plain-English explainers for core concepts related to this topic.
What is a Headless Browser?
A headless browser is a real browser engine that runs without a visible window — used to render JavaScript-heavy pages before you scrape them.
Read guideWhat is robots.txt?
robots.txt is a text file sites publish at /robots.txt to tell crawlers which paths they may fetch and how politely to crawl.
Read guideWhat is Web Scraping?
Web scraping is the automated collection of data from web pages — turning HTML into structured records you can store, analyze, or feed into other systems.
Read guideFrom Basics
Quick-reference cheatsheets for tools and libraries in this space.
Playwright for Scraping Cheatsheet
Playwright drives real browsers from code so you can scrape JavaScript-rendered pages, wait for content, and extract the DOM.
Read guideBeautiful Soup Cheatsheet
Beautiful Soup parses HTML and XML in Python so you can find tags, text, and attributes with a simple API.
Read guideExternal resources
Curated tools, docs, and communities worth bookmarking.
Frequently asked questions
Quick answers about this topic hub.
Is web scraping legal?▾
Scraping publicly available data (pages you can view logged out) is generally legal under US case law such as hiQ v. LinkedIn — the CFAA does not treat that as unauthorized access. Risk rises when you scrape behind a login, ignore contracts or privacy law, or misuse the data after collection. Prefer official APIs when they fit.
What tools are best for web scraping?▾
For static HTML, Python with requests and Beautiful Soup is a solid default. Scrapy fits larger crawls and pipelines. For JavaScript-rendered pages, use a headless browser like Playwright or Puppeteer so the DOM matches what users see.
How do I scrape a JavaScript-heavy site?▾
Fetch alone often returns an empty shell. Drive a real browser with Playwright, wait for the content you need, then extract with selectors or the rendered HTML. Handle pagination, lazy loading, and network idle carefully so you do not race the page.
Should I respect robots.txt?▾
Yes for polite, sustainable scraping. robots.txt is not always a hard legal rule, but ignoring crawl delays and disallow rules is a fast way to get blocked and burns goodwill. Throttle requests and identify your bot with a clear User-Agent.
When should I use an API instead of scraping?▾
Whenever a stable official or partner API gives you the data you need. APIs are usually faster, more reliable, and clearer on terms. Scrape when the data is public, there is no suitable API, and you can collect it without harming the site.